"Lines of Flight"

Tom Lucas

Norwich University of the Arts, England.

Lines of flight, a title inspired by 'A thousand Plateaus', is an ongoing series of images studying different ideas of escape, closely linked to the locals of a remote village in central Sweden and the villages surrounding.

Rites of passage are formed by community events through potential construction of a new self, via means of movement, travel and journeying. These verbs may constitute a rite of passage for a community deemed as nomadically influenced. Must nomadically influenced communities be in constant cognitive mobility, physical motion, always in various directions?

A notion of two different ways of life are discovered in the motion of the locals. An attempted escape from societal norms integrated with a nomadically influenced way of living. Basic life is kept crucial in the village, in the form of mainstream western culture; phones, guns and automobiles. However the closeness is shown between the local people and nature via anti mainstream and anti capitalist behaviour, or rites of passage, within the preservation of the environment.

Though not the traditional nomad community, could these communities influenced by nomadism be taking the form of small permanent settlements, and successfully abandoning the oppressive influence of cultural hegemony? Must we live under the oppression of dogmatic ideologies?